Emotional Geographies Research Articles

EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF EFL SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS IN ONLINE TEACHING IMPLEMENTATION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

This study was carried out to know what emotional geographic experiences EFL senior high school teachers experienced while teaching online during the Covid-19 pandemic and how they dealt with these emotional geographic problems. This research is qualitative research using the descriptive method. The participants in this study were 4 high school EFL teachers from 4 different high schools in Banjarmasin. Data were collected through an interview process. The study results show that of Hargreaves' 5 emotional geographies frameworks, each participant expresses various emotions. Some negative emotions such as anger, irritation, or dissatisfaction, and some positive emotions such as satisfaction or pleasure. In addition, the participants also shared their various ways of dealing with the emotional geographies problems according to each of the problems they raised such as reporting the problem to the counseling teacher, giving the student motivation, and more.

Mapping Intimate Geographies of Grief and Loss

Cartography has been pivotal in making visible the number of people who die in the context of migration. In this article, the author explores the potential of mapping to study and develop another dimension of the geography of death within exile: the more intimate dimensions of post-mortem geographies as experienced by those who survive a loved one. Inspired by Avril Maddrell’s call for developing new cartographic representations to share difficult emotions and memories associated with death, the author mobilized two alternative mapping practices—inductive visualization and sensibility mapping—to chart the emotional and intimate geographies embedded in the stories of two migrants who lost a close friend with whom they lived while in exile. The mapping process that led the author to represent these intimate post-mortem geographies brought me to reflect on the importance of developing alternative cartographic forms of expression that focus on the experiential and the emotional, rather than on the factual and the measurable. By steering this cartographic shift away from the fact of death as the end of a journey to death as a lingering event in the life of those who survive, the author proposes a cartography of grief and mourning that aims to contribute to individual and collective remembering.

EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHY EVIDENCE LEFT FROM PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ TEACHING PRACTICE EXPERIENCES DURING THE PANDEMIC

This narrative research exposed four pre-service teachers’ emotions in pre-service teaching practice during the pandemic of Covid-19. It focused on how the pre-service teachers enacted their emotions while they performed various teaching challenges during the pandemic of COVID-19. Written reflections during the pre-service teaching from four pre-service teachers were taken as the data. By employing Andy Hargreaves’ emotional geographies theory, the research indicated that pre-service teachers experienced positive and negative emotions during the practice of teaching.

Bach on the harbourfront: Geographies of the Toronto music garden

AbstractLocated on the redeveloping waterfront of Canada's largest city, the Toronto Music Garden is a unique public garden inspired by the first of J. S. Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Designed through a collaboration with cellist Yo‐Yo Ma and landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, the garden attempts not to represent Bach or his music but to inscribe its essence on the landscape. Several lines of inquiry are pursued in this paper. First, it provides an overview of the geographies of gardens and the ways in which elements of garden design and music composition have influenced each other. Second, it reveals the creative process involved in translating the elements of one art form (music) to another (landscape design). Especially important to this process is Messervy's use of what she terms ‘archetypal’ landforms. Third, the Music Garden is analysed as an integral part of the lived landscape of Toronto's post‐industrial waterfront. Finally, the paper contends that the power and significance of the Toronto Music Garden lies in the interstices between the emotional geographies that informed the design and the resulting affective atmosphere experienced by a diversity of visitors. The methodology for this project includes open‐ended interviews, fieldwork, and archival research. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the roles that the arts can play in the production and utilisation of distinctive public spaces.

Surya-shakti-sharir: Embodying India’s solar energy transition

ABSTRACT Aspiring to India’s COP26 pledge of attaining 500 gigawatts of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030 will entail nothing short of a colossal transformation of rural spaces. Solar park development has already disrupted the lives and livelihoods of marginalized peasants through land dispossession, uneven provisioning of electricity and water resources, dislocation of fuelwood and grazing access, and the diminution of labor opportunities. However, it remains unclear how affected peasants internalize the burdens of decarbonization. The aim of the paper is to address the following questions: How are the geographies of solar energy transitions embodied? How do dispossessed peasants respond affectively? Drawing on feminist political ecology literature and fieldwork that included household surveys and semi-structured interviews, the author finds that the dispossessed embody a range of affective responses, including emotional geographies and embodied resistance, that enable or constrain the place-making of equitable alternative sites of solar energy generation. The author concludes that as India rapidly erects large-scale solar infrastructures—indisputably imperative efforts to confront the climate crisis—the embodiment of injustices suffered by the dispossessed will haunt low-carbon futures.

In harmony or out of tune: Affective and emotional geographies of all-male choirs in London, UK

This article examines the growing popularity of weekly amateur choral singing for adult men, with a specific focus in London, UK. This paper moves away from discourses of social health and wellbeing to bring together critical studies of masculinity with emotional geographies of sound, to better understand the links between choirs as an affective space and the complex, symbolic relationship between men and their voices. Where research has shown that non-competitive group activity is central to men's sense of connection and provides a space for men to express emotions, friendship and intimacy, there is great potential to analyse how the role of sound (volume, vibrations) and use of choral voice work (softening, blending, harmonies) directly facilitates this connection. This paper remains cautious of presenting group singing as an automatic panacea to disconnection, exploring the exclusions for those who are ‘out of tune’ and (musically and socially) unable to harmonise with others.

Muslim Women’s Activism in the USA: Politics of Diverse Resistance Strategies

This paper will explore ways in which dynamics of visibility/invisibility of American Muslim women activists are transformed in secular places like USA, while these women struggle surviving on the borderlands. Borderland and boundary are perceived as lived spaces that are culturally hybrid and are seen as a theatre for radical action. In this paper I contend that Muslim women activists in the USA operate from geographies of borderland and while inhabiting this hybrid third space they generate discourses of dissent that challenge stereotypes about them. Hailing from diverse backgrounds and countries, with different cultural roots yet same belief system and faith, American Muslim women activists adapt varied resistance strategies to challenge the Muslim patriarchy and the western hegemony that has persisted to portray Muslim women as an oppressed group of people in need of saving. Tracing Muslim women activists’ emotional and experiential geographies I will look at ways in which dynamics of solidarity between them have moved beyond dichotomous divisions of global-local, global North-global South, and empire-colony. With the discussion of lives and activism of Amina Wadud, Linda Sarsour and Asra Nomani, this paper will contextualize these activists within the spaces of resistance which they inhabit, while navigating their challenges in the context of geopolitical tensions and conflicts which are their lived realities in the USA.

A life without a plan? Freelance musicians in pandemic limbo

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already precarious conditions of freelance workers. The aim of this study is to understand what it means for freelance musicians to be in pandemic limbo. Thirteen Swedish professional freelance musicians in the classical genre were interviewed about their experiences in the midst of the pandemic. A theoretical frame of reference is offered with concepts from Bourdieu, sociology of emotions and emotional geographies. This enables an understanding of what it means as a freelancer to be dislocated and disrupted in relation to places and spaces of work and investments in time and emotions. The conclusions are about the ambivalent emotions and processes of emotional management that are caused by the pandemic. For freelance musicians, depending on their access to the live-settings of gigs, auditions and social venues, it is like being thrown back in time and place (back to where careers were slowly built). However, while at a distance from the normal run of careers, constructive processes of critical reflection and re-orientation have been initiated.

The trauma of exploitation: Emotional geographies of temporary migration and workplace unfreedom

This paper advances a focus on emotions as a key dimension of the actualisation of workplace exploitation experienced by temporary migrants. In doing so, we extend understandings of forced labour, unfreedom and migration and their concern for the operation of coercion in employment relations. While political-economic and legal accounts of work and oppression can tell us much about systems that underpin the occurrence of exploitation, we argue that the fluidity of unfreedoms in labour exploitation are fundamentally embodied and shaped by emotional experiences and manipulation. In order to advance this emotional account, we draw on interviews with people holding work and study visas who have experienced workplace exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand, a context where the rapid growth in temporary migration has been associated with growing evidence of labour market abuse. Our paper addresses three key emotional dimensions of workplace exploitation that emerged in this research: inducement into exploitation, entrapment and the emotional sustenance of exploitation. Through this account we demonstrate how unfreedom is felt in the lives of temporary migrants and point towards the need to rethink both scholarly accounts of forced labour and policy responses to the workplace exploitation of temporary migrants.

Analysis of the Emotional Identification Mechanism of Campus Edible Landscape from the Perspective of Emotional Geography: An Empirical Study of a Chinese University Town.

Against the background of “the emotional turn” in geography, the study of emotional identification is attracting increasing attention among researchers. Edible landscape resources can satisfy the emotional needs of teachers and students by enabling them to experience pastoral landscapes that carry cultural and landscape values to campus environments. Based on a questionnaire survey of 419 students and teachers at Chenggong University Town in China, this study improved the structural equation modeling (SEM) method to construct a model to analyze the emotional identification mechanism of the campus edible landscape. The research found that emotional identification played an intermediary role between perception and behavioral intention, manifested as an association mechanism in which surface values influence perception, perception influences emotional identification, and emotional identification influences behavioral intention. The emotional identification model revealed the relationship between teachers and students’ emotional identification and the value of campus edible landscape resources for the first time. It also uncovered the universality of the association mechanism in the research of emotional geography.

Mapping the Silk Road: Geographies of Nature, Affect, and Spirituality in the Turkmen Poetry of Magtymguly Pyragy

Abstract Magtymguly Pyragy is considered the national poet of the Turkmen people and credited with introducing classical Chagatai as a literary language and founding Turkmen literature.1 Hailing from the Caspian region near the modern-day border region between Turkmenistan and Iran,2 Pyragy traveled far and wide to Anatolia, Bukhara, Khiva, Afghanistan, and India; as a result, these geographies feature prominently in his poetry. Pyragy’s far-reaching geographic references in his poetry touch upon every stretch of the Silk Road from the Volga-Ural region all the way to China. His numerous verses evincing fear of the Kizilbash threat and his invocations of celebrated Persian mystic poets whose ranks he wished to join chart emotional, affective, and spiritual geographies that illuminate the political upheavals of the eighteenth century and the persistence of Pyragy’s own poetic ambitions in the face of regional instability. Surveying the diverse geographies and ecologies in the poetry of Pyragy reveals the unsettling realities of Turkmen tribal disunity, the affective expansiveness of the poetic Turkmen imaginary in depicting foreign landscapes, and the importance of nature and pride of place in the Caspian region in the midst of the shifting political geographies of the time.

Affective atmospheres of weapons technologies: The case of battle drones, combat fighters and bodies in contemporary German geopolitics

Using the example of the defense and security sector at the Innovation and Leadership in Aerospace aviation fair in Berlin, this paper interrogates how the presentation of weapons technologies at German security and aviation fairs produces a/effects that influence the body and serve to legitimize political decisions. It examines to what extent the body becomes the site of geopolitical negotiation via affective atmospheres and how different scales interact within this process. First, I argue that affective connections between weapons technologies and spectators are essential for legitimizing warfare technologies. Second, I argue that affects of weapons technologies are subject to ambivalence and ambiguity, and that they are to be understood as entangled with other affects in the same body. Third, I argue that affects become effective across material and spatial scales. Drawing on geographic work on affective atmospheres, debates in intimate geopolitics and feminist science and technology studies, the paper contributes to critical geopolitics by unpacking the role of affective dimensions in naturalizing the development and acquisition of weapons technologies. In doing so, it also contributes to debates on the methodological operationalization of theories of affect and to emotional geographies of (in)security.

Between place and territory: Young people's emotional geographies of security and insecurity in Brussels' deprived areas

While much of literature on place attachment describes it as an affective bond between a (young) person and place, with positive psychosocial consequences such as identification, rootedness and belonging, some authors are cautious and stress that an enhanced attachment to place, termed “territoriality”, may have negative consequences such as hostility towards outsiders and a sense of non-belonging elsewhere. In this paper, I ask how we should understand this difference and how the analysis of young people's emotional geographies of (in)security can bring light to this question. The paper finds that emotional geographies of (in)security are instrumental in understanding how a “positive” attachment to place may lead to a “negative” attachment to territory, how some young people emotionally attach to places and some are inclined to claim these places against outsiders (and also at the expense of other members of the community). This explicit appropriation of public spaces in the home neighbourhood is co-constituted by feeling secure inside and insecure outside the area. Territoriality may be a response to or an expression of ontological insecurity and of the inner unease that prompts them to strange avoidance and contorted strategies for manipulating spaces and setting boundaries designed to secure the self.

‘Their lives are even more on hold now’: migrants’ experiences of waiting and immobility during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Several recent studies have examined experiences of waiting and spatial and temporal immobility among refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. This paper investigates recent migrants’ experiences of waiting and (spatial and temporal) immobility in the context of COVID-19 lockdowns, and against the background of pandemic isolation and boredom. It asks how public health measures affected ‘recently’ arrived migrants’ and how these migrants experienced waiting and immobility differently before and during the pandemic. We argue that differences in recent migrants’ status and housing situations shape how they experience immobility during and beyond the pandemic. This paper contributes to research on immobility in migration by highlighting the importance of diverse emotional geographies of loneliness and frustration; it concludes that immobility is situated along an isolation-to-agitation continuum.

Narrative and folklore as methodologies for studying emotions, embodiment, and water during the 2014 Elk River chemical spill in West Virginia

ABSTRACT Water is an urgent topic of research in cultural and feminist geographies. Geographers study water through interdisciplinary approaches including critical resource geography, political ecology, and feminist theory. An emerging area of research within cultural and feminist geography considers the affective, emotional qualities of water as part of water’s social and political ramifications. Methodologically, the emotional qualities of water are commonly explored through data on everyday lived phenomena and respondents´ narratives. Although emotions have been studied by feminist geographers for at least two decades, geographers continue to debate the range of approaches and methodologies for studying emotions and suggest that methodological gaps remain. An underdeveloped area of research on the emotional geographies of water acknowledges the contextual and performative aspects of narrative. We explore the performative aspects of narrative using folklore studies and its methodological usage in emotional geography. We connect emotional geography with folklore studies concepts of context and performance. We do this through a case study of the 2014 Elk River chemical spill in West Virginia to explore personal experience narrative as a methodological tool for analyzing emotions to contribute to methodologies of emotional geography.

“I get a whiz in my body as I walk past it”: Visceral imaginaries in children's everyday mobilities

This article focuses on how the visceral, sensual and the imagined shape children's everyday mobility experiences and their meaning making around their everyday mobility, thus contributing to the growing field of study on children's emotional geographies and to the field of visceral geographies. By introducing the concept of visceral imaginaries, the role of the imagined in children's spatial and mobile experiences is highlighted and developed. The children further emerge as aged bodies in these visceral processes, as the affective practices and visceral imaginaries position children as aged subjects. The findings are based on a qualitative research project on children's practices and experiences of their everyday mobilities, in which 59 children (7–13 years old) participated, predominantly from white urban middle-class families in a mid-sized municipality in Sweden.

Atmospheres of the other: Building and feeling Stockholm's orthodox synagogue

In this article, I use the concept of atmosphere to analyse disparate sources related to the process of sacralisation of the orthodox synagogue Adass Jisroel in modern Stockholm. Using the synagogue as an entry point, I explore the affective landscapes related to its unofficially sacred places in firstly a Pietist orphanage and secondly a cinema, and how they shaped inner-communal relations. The material components of Adass Jisroel's sites elicited different emotions from different visiting bodies: its orthodox members aimed to create a space of religious continuity and communal integrity, reformed guests othered the members, while poorer orthodox Jews felt alienated. By analysing these multiple affective experiences linked to material changes of set architectural designs, I outline, for the first time, the orthodox minority's unstable position between fragility and stability in Sweden's capital from 1870 until the 1940s. On a greater scale, through this case study, I propose that the concept of atmosphere provides the field of emotional geography with conceptual muscle to both excavate silenced minority voices, and explore the role of the built environment in eliciting emotions that shape, cement, contest and transform the inner-communal hierarchal landscape that unofficially sacred places are irrevocably situated in.

Rewilding: An emotional nature

AbstractRewilding is an emotional subject. It inspires passions and argument in spades. As a form of conservation, rewilding offers exciting possibilities to address ecological crises but it is also a threat for many people, leading to dispute and impasse. This paper explores the role emotions play both to inspire rewilding and in the ensuing conflicts. Informed by emotional geographies and feminist political ecology, the analysis attends to the socio‐cultural differences underpinning emotional response and argues that emotions need to be taken seriously to better understand the socio‐natural processes underway. Unravelling the work that emotions do, the experience of joy, arising from time spent in nature, is seen to initiate a desire for rewilding amongst activists. By contrast, for opponents, rewilding prompts a sense of anger, which arises in response to a perceived threat to their identity as farmers and associated feelings of vulnerability. Critically, this vulnerability often remains occluded by the dominance of anger within debates, which explains why conflict has become so intractable. However, by attending to the full register of emotions at work, including those that are not always surfaced, and by better understanding the basis of such emotions, an avenue towards greater empathy is proposed.

Emotional Geographies of Exclusion: Whiteness and Ability in Teacher Education Research

Context: Geographies of exclusion (e.g., segregated special education classrooms, school district zoning) are constituted through intersecting oppressive ideologies (e.g., ableism, racism, classism) that co-naturalize notions of “normalcy” and deviance and yield harmful consequences for disabled children of Color. Geographies of exclusion dynamically contribute to and constitute teacher candidates’ feelings about themselves and their social worlds. White teacher candidates’ investment in dominant racial ideologies is well-documented, and recent scholarship has interrogated the role of white emotionality in these processes. However, the extent to which white teacher candidates emotionally ascribe to oppressive constructions of ability have been underexamined. Focus of Study: We sought to uncover how white teacher candidates (TCs) used emotional practices to position themselves in relation to ability within geographies of exclusion as they narrated their educational journeys. Such an examination is necessary to upend ongoing constructions of racial-ability hierarchies in and through teacher education. Using disability critical race theory and emotional geographies, our study was guided by the following question: How do white, nondisabled TCs engage in emotional practices in relation to geographies of exclusion? Research Design: This critical narrative study took place in two teacher education programs in the Pacific Northwest with 42 white, nondisabled teacher candidates. We drew on qualitative mapping as a method for participants to tell stories about themselves and their relationships to places and people over time. All participants generated narratives through written reflections after creating their maps, clarifying aspects of their maps and providing details not captured in their visual representations. Data sources included 42 written narratives and 36 qualitative maps. We analyzed emotional dimensions of TCs’ written narratives and qualitative maps through multiple rounds of both deductive and inductive coding. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analysis revealed ways white TCs weaponized emotionality to uphold racial-ability hierarchies through emotional geographies of gratitude, ambivalence, and claims to care. By sentimentalizing multiply-marginalized children’s suffering, TCs preserved a façade of being committed to educational justice. We conclude with suggestions for educational researchers, emphasizing that research with white teachers cannot ignore emotional practices that perpetuate harm for multiply-marginalized children. Instead, researchers must surface these engagements head-on, using DisCrit as a driver in teacher education research toward intersectional justice.

Towards an agenda for oral history and geography: (Re)locating emotion in family narratives of domestic abuse in 1970s East Kilbride

AbstractThis paper sets out a research agenda for oral history in/and geography, with a particular focus on emotional historical geographies. With three families' relocation from inner‐city Glasgow to the new town of East Kilbride as the empirical backdrop, I argue that oral history methodology is uniquely well placed to capture both the emotionality and spatiality of historical narratives. Whilst previous reviews across geography and oral history theory have considered important emotional markers such as tone of voice, the expression of feeling and body language, I intervene by focusing on different narrative strategies employed throughout the interview and argue that the geographical remit of an interviewee's memories is inseparable from their emotional brevity. The focus of the paper is therefore threefold. Firstly, I consider the subjective temporalities and spatialities that oral history narrators employ when seeking composure, considering how they might “re‐place” their narratives (and thus themselves) in the interview setting. Secondly, I argue that how interviewees might “re‐place” themselves is inextricable, and as such so is any emotional reading of the interview, from the inter‐subjective relationship produced by such an encounter. Finally, I explore the implications of this methodology for carefully elaborating on the intersection between the intimate geographies of the home, and geographies of violence. How the interviewees witnessed domestic abuse among their families was moulded by the context of their relocation. Moreover, the inter‐subjective relationship, an analysis of which I argue is crucial to the findings of the paper, was also distinctly moulded by that same family context – as I was conducting these interviews with members of my own family.